Zoom one of the features of a camera can add a special contentment to the digital photography. However, many beginner photographers are confused between optical and digital zoom. An understanding of the difference between the two zooms will help you to choose the proper digital camera that is best for you.
Digital zoom takes a central portion of the image and enlarges it, thus ‘simulating’ optical zoom. In other words, the camera crops a portion of the image and then enlarges it back to size. In doing so, you may lose image quality. If you’ve been regularly using digital zoom and wondered why your pictures did not look that great, that is reason.
Is digital zoom therefore all bad? No, not at all. It’s a feature that you might want in your digital camera, in fact, all digital cameras include some digital zoom, and therefore you can’t really avoid it. As far as digital zoom is concerned, you can do it in camera or you can also do it afterwards in an image editing software, such as Photoshop. So, when a digital camera is advertised with 3x digital zoom, no big deal, you can achieve the same 3x zoom and more digital zoom effect using an image editing software. The advantage of doing it later is that you can then decide exactly which portion to crop and how much to enlarge, If you do it in camera, image quality might be lost and can cause the resolution to reduce. Your photo will be blurred, much like what you obtain in a low megapixel camera.
Optical zoom is known as when the lens physically moves to make the image larger and the glass elements arrange themselves closer or further away to zoom in on the action. If you are taking a photo far away from the subjects, be sure that the camera you buy has an optical zoom. An optical zoom is a true zoom lens, like the zoom lens is being used in a film camera. These lenses produce much better-quality images.
Most point and shoot cameras use an optical system up to a certain point and then switch to a digital system. For example your point and shoot camera might use optical zoom until your image gets 3x as large, then it switches to a digital zoom up to 10x as large, which will cause pixilation. So as long as you use only the optical zoom function your image will retain the maximum resolution.
To summarize, I have reviewed a few things that you should keep an eye out for when shopping for a new digital camera.
